City's booming baby figures

Carly Morrissey
Reporter
Carly Morrissey stared her journalism career with APN at the Dalby Herald in 2006. After two years there she took a job at the Gympie Times where she spent four years covering council, court, politics, sport, emergency services rounds and everything in between. In 2012 she became Editor of Big Rigs National Newspaper where she remained until 2018 when she started with the Springfield Daily Record as a reporter. In 2013 Carly won an APN editorial award (non-daily reporter) and was a finalist in...

BABIES are booming in Ipswich and Springfield, birth statistics reveal.

Latest state birth statistics show the highest numbers were recorded in areas with higher populations with Ipswich the fifth highest in the state with 3351 births following Brisbane (14,598), Gold Coast (6985), Moreton Bay (5539) and Logan (4960).

While Springfield Lakes is outperforming other suburbs in terms of births per population.

That's more than one baby for each of the suburb's 244 streets, bringing the fertility rate for the area to 2.1 babies per woman of child-bearing age.

The high number of births comes after 325 were registered in 2016.

Last year 120 new bubs and their mums attended a packed inaugural Welcoming the Babies ceremony in Springfield Central.

In 2017 there were 61,158 births registered in Queensland, a small decline of about 1 per cent on 2016 figures.

Figures reveal there were more babies born in the south-east than the rest of the state combined, with Riverview recording the second highest fertility rate (2.94) than any other suburb sized statistical area in the Greater Brisbane Statistical Area covering from northern Moreton Bay to the Ipswich hinterland and down to Beenleigh.

Looking at local government areas there were 488 babies born in the Lockyer Valley in 2017 and the fertility rate was 1.83 babies per woman of child-bearing age.

The fertility rate in the Scenic Rim was 1.95 with 377 babies registered to mothers in the region while the fertility rate for Ipswich as a whole was 2.15 babies per woman of child-bearing age.